June reading #667: Good Omens

[melannen]

June reading #667:

Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

I re-read this for the first time in maybe a decade after almost having memorized it as a teenager. So there goes my last excuse for not watching the show yet. Good news: it has only very lightly been visited by the Suck Fairy!

There is one (deeply disconcerting) bear.
There is no yuri, and not even really any good potential for it - I don’t think it even passes the Bechdel test.


10 things that are true about GO, the book, that I want to remember going into TV canon:

1. The bit with the Queen is not some kind of curse or demonic influence, and it’s not because Crowley has some kind of affinity for Queen. It’s because, in the late 80s and the 90s (possibly before then, I can only speak from personal experience) any tape (or, later, CD) left in a car for too long did turn into a Best of Queen album, even for perfectly normal humans. I still have one of the Best of Queen albums that appeared in the car when I was in high school (note: before I ever read the book) and I have no idea where it came from, I barely knew that Queen was a band at the time, and it was not in a Best of Queen case. It’s in the same category of magic as single socks disappearing and ballpoint pens spontaneously generating (which, tbf, Crowley may have taken credit for.)

I don’t really know how to translate that for people who only know the era of MP3s and streaming in the car; and music in general has become so diverse and accessible that there’s probably no equivalent to Queen that would appear for everyone anymore, anyway. The closest thing I can think of is what happens if you hit “shuffle”, especially if there’s someone you particularly want to impress in the car, or you have a headache, but that’s not really the same, and it doesn’t involve physical artifacts manifesting. It may be one of the very special period bits of GO that just won’t translate to the 21st century well.

Or maybe modern-Crowley keeps Queen tapes in the Bentley because when he tries to put digital music on shuffle, it just keeps playing “Take Me To Church”.

(It’s actually pretty strongly implied in the book that Crowley has fairly well-educated and well-rounded musical tastes; the sound system in his flat is one of the few things that’s actually used, and the Queen curse only applies to albums in vehicles. And he keeps trying to buy other music for the Bentley…)

2. Aziraphale’s bookshop isn’t especially special, either. Oh, it is in how long it’s been around with one owner - much like the Bentley - but I’m fairly sure it’s connected through L-Space to half a dozen of my other favorite bookshops, whose proprietors are equally skilled at driving away casual customers and not making any sales.

3. Honestly, there are a lot of things in the book that the fandom treats as strange but are just ordinary things? Or at least were ordinary things in the 80s. I had this same problem with WTNV fandom: it works because these aren’t strange and supernatural, not because they are. :P

4. Crowley likes food. IDK where or why they decided he doesn’t eat anymore, but he’s just as tempted by a good canape or cake as his counterpart.

Also there’s no evidence he actually does anything terrible to the plants. Other than repot them.

5. Angel’s wings and demon’s wings are the same, except that demon wings are frequently better groomed.

This, admittedly, has been the source of at least 30% of the fights in GO fandom historically, especially since the book doesn’t specify much else about them, and admittedly the fanwank that angel wings have always come in different colors and Aziraphale’s just happen to be white and Crowley’s just happen to be black is fine as fanwanks go, but I don’t really like it. I’m sure the way the show did it was great, but imagine what you could have done if we’d gone the whole journey without seeing Crowley’s wings and when they were finally unfurled they were exactly the same as Aziraphale’s. (I have always voted for eyed Pride wings, like a Van Eyck angel, but snowy white is acceptable if boring.)

It’s important because a huge part of the theme of the book is that the duality of Heaven and Hell isn’t a duality, it’s just a bunch of people dividing themselves into sides because they think they’re supposed to. And therefore Aziraphale and Crowley isn’t about opposites coming together or about choosing a third way between the two, it’s about Aziraphale and Crowley accepting that they aren’t opposites and were never really apart and dualities are constructions, not essential qualities. And I think that’s super important because the duality story is a hell of a lot easier to play out, but choosing the there-never-was-a-duality story instead is one of the things that makes GO so special.

6, Angel are sexless unless they make an effort.

(Admittedly this is the source of the *other* 70% of arguments in the fandom, but you can interpret that however you want - as long as they aren’t allosexual. That much seems pretty inarguable. Too bad we didn’t have that term for most of the old arguments!)

7. Good Omens isn’t a book about Aziraphale and Crowley. Sorry, I wish it was too. Yes, they are major characters, but there’s a whoIe (excruciating) third of the book in the middle where all Aziraphale does is read a book for two paragraphs and then make a phone call, and Crowley doesn’t even do that much.

It’s not really a character-driven book in general, and character-driven books are so ubiquitous these days that people don’t really know what to do with the other sort except try to read them as if they are. But it’s as much the Adam’s story or Anathema’s story as Aziraphale and Crowley’s, and it’s more The Story Of The Apocalypse That Wasn’t than any of those.

(A & C are by far the best characters and the best part of the book, partly I think because they aged a lot better than some of the other characters, and partly because fandom has kept them alive enough that I didn’t notice as much how dated they are. But also because they’re just really great characters. You can have great characters in a non-character-driven story, that’s one of the things fanfic is *for*, really.)

8. It’s also very definitely not the story of Crowley and Aziraphale’s epic sphere-crossed love affair. I mean, I’m not going to try to argue that they aren’t having one, but it’s not what the book is about, and tbh, it’s not really all that relevant to their arcs in the book. What is driving their choices is their love for humanity and Earth, not their feelings for each other.

You might say that their relationship (however you read it) is important in that it lets them be more effective in their efforts to stop Armageddon except that would require them being effective in any way whatsoever, so, no.

But I also think that if you try to re-write canon so that it is about Crowley and Aziraphale choosing each other above Heaven and Hell, you actually lose some important parts of the story. There’s three main pairs in the book (C&A are definitely a pair in the book’s structure, regardless of how you read the relationship) : Anathema & Newt; Shadwell & Tracy; Crowley & Aziraphale. And it’s actually, I think, really important that none of them are passionate romances: they are *com*passionate with each other, and making the best of things, and finding love where it’s offered, and it’s a very human (and humanist) sort of love, and maybe they’re not idealized romances, but they’re all being careful not to hurt each other, and in the long run that’s more than passion.

Crowley and Aziraphale are two people who’ve slowly realized they get on with each other better than with anyone else, and who have each other’s backs when it’s important, and that’s what matters, and that’s what’s human. The question of pining and passion is secondary.

….I am really really ace sometimes. But then so is this book. :P

9. The characters in GO are all built as mirrors of each other: the obvious one being the mirroring of the Them and the Horsemen, and the Horsemen and the other Horsemen, and the Them and the Johnsonites. And the three babies in the three-way baby switch, which starts it all off. But there’s also the mirroring of Aziraphale and Crowley with each other, and Newt and Anathema with each other (the thing that sells me more than anything on their relationship is their cross-referencing their newspaper clippings with each other on the fly), and Newt and Anathema with their storied ancestors, and Shadwell and Tracy with Newt and Anathema, and Adam's two fathers (I don't think I realized before this read that the whole thing kicks off because Mr. Young is sufficiently good at lurking while emitting stinking vapours that Crowley just assumed he was from Hell) and so on and so forth.

And, of course, Shadwell and Tracy with Aziraphale and Crowley. (If you want to sell me on Aziraphale/Crowley as intentionally canon, pointing out the parallels with Shadwell and Tracy’s relationship is the best way to do it...)

10. The third baby lived. He breeds tropical fish and will someday discover American football and be truly happy. Adam considers him (and Warlock) a friend. You should always read the footnotes.


Anyway if you’re on Spotify, here is what I am calling A Good Omens fanmix that will make you wish it was Queen after all, consisting of songs that got stuck in my head while I was reading.

(What are the cool kids doing with fanmixes these days? Spotify is easy, but if you have a free account you can only listen on shuffle, and I always cared about track order. I know it was 8tracks for a while, but I think that broke, and nobody seems to be uploading .zips anymore.)

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

Yeah, it confuses me that so many people don't understand that the Queen thing was literally true up until at least the early 2000s. Do they think that entire generations know every word to Bohemian Rhapsody because of the radio? Because where I grew up the radio basically did not play Queen, but it's not like it needed to.

[melannen]

I honestly had never heard a Queen song that I am aware of until the discs of that Best Of set started turning up in the car when I was looking for other things and I figured I might as well see what was on them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[recessional]

....I mean it literally never happened to me once.

The only Queen cassettes that existed were my uncle's, which were VERY deliberate. And which I disliked.

I was always slightly bewildered by the assertion that this happened to everyone. And still am.

[chomiji]

Queen was super-popular in DC when I was in high school and college.

[stellar_dust]

nnnnnnng watch the show so we can talk about it!

while some of the things you mention are not specifically mentioned or are absent in the show, I think it is exceedingly successful at preserving the essence.

(The thing that tripped me up most on re-read was the 1980s-white-British-man-casual-racism. Urgh. The couple of specific bits there that jumped out at me are not in the show.)

8tracks is still sort of active, or at least there have been roughly twelve thousand new GO fanmixes posted over the last month. I gave in and started paying for it last spring - listening to random, infinite, repetitive fanmixes was one of few things that kept me sane during dissertation writing and I could very much not deal with the listening quotas and ads. Do you want to share my login? Hopefully it won't freak out if we do that. I need it, it's my life soundtrack these days. Just don't delete any of my collections.

[stellar_dust]

(thanks for not putting From Eden on your playlist! every fandom has That One Song That Annoys Me But Everyone Puts On Every Mix .... )

gonna listen while I write the Very Last Bit Of Dissertation Edits tomorrow.

[melannen]

Yeah, there are a ... lot more of just little offhand bits of racism than I remembered.

A lot of them can be read as accurate reflections of societal racism rather than the book itself being racist (like, for example, the bit about the Witchfinder Army's colonialist past) but even if so they are not as explicitly critical as I could wish they were. And some of it (like the Wasabi) is stuff that would have read differently, and less about race, in the very specific context of the original publication. But to a modern reader they honestly come off as just completely unnecessary microaggressions against a fair fraction of your potential readership. (There's also some similar random, unnecessary bits of passing fatphobic "jokes" in a few places. :/)

Nah, I don't need your 8tracks login; I have my music podcasts, Spotify, radio and a ridiculously large cd/vinyl/mp3 collection I rarely bother with when I actually do want background music. And I can't do songs with lyrics while trying to do any language-based tasks, so when I need that kind of music I have to put on instrumentals anyway.

I just keep wanting to make fanmixes again and not knowing where to put them. If there was an 8tracks/spotify type service where I could get a paid account and thereby remove ads for my *listeners*, I might go for it, but that seems unlikely. I think what I heard about 8tracks getting worse was more about the mix-creator end of it than the listener end? Not sure.

[alasse_irena]

8tracks is still active in some parts of the world, I understand. Maybe North America? Idk. But something happened to them with regard to licensing that means that in Australia every song on a track is instead the first YouTube result for that song, and thus are frequently not there at all.

Spotify you can at least play in order on desktop, just not phone.

[beccaelizabeth]

👍

[mindstalk]

Good analysis.

Bear?

Wasn't the third baby Greasy Johnson?

[melannen]

There is an extremely battered stuffed bear in Madame Tracy's boudoir that gazes judgmentally at Shadwell. That bear has Seen Things. (the whole thing with Madam Tracy's stuffed animals was...weird, and I don't like it, not one bit. I think the authors were aiming at one thing and missed their mark entirely.) Yes the third baby was Greasy Johnson! I enjoy him so much and want him and Adam to be college boyfriends. With Warlock along for the ride sometimes.

[sara]

I used to have an iPod that would invariably, when set to shuffle, spit out The Pogues' "Lorca's Novena" (c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpSagdEdCDs). It always seemed to me like the modern equivalent of Best of Queen.

[melannen]

I think bad shuffles is the best you can do these days, yeah. I don't know if there's a single track or album anymore that's as ubiquitous as "Best of Queen" used to be, though. Not counting ones that get deliberately loaded on everyone's devices by corporations.

[lazaefair]

I use Mixcloud because I’m also very concerned with track order, and it’s not really any more work than burning mp3s to a disc (certainly less work than copying tracks between cassette tapes). You just need Audacity or some other audio editing software, and off you go.

There’s also YouTube playlists (or YouTube Music playlists, which is a bit of an odd beast but has an advantage in that the “official” music tracks are less likely to be hit with DMCA and randomly disappeared from your painstakingly curated fanmix).

I tried uploading zip files to Google Drive for a while there, but literally nobody downloaded them. *yells vaguely at clouds*

[melannen]

Ooh, mixcloud sounds like it's worth looking at! I still download .zips when I can, but it's tough these days because nothing's set up with the idea that you have a stash of files that you listen to as files. (And Winamp is gone. :( )

[genarti]

I believe the "Crowley doesn't eat" headcanon comes from the fact that in the miniseries we see them out to meals a few times, and we see Crowley drinking various beverages, but he never actually has food or (I think) even a plate in front of him onscreen. Personally I assume he does eat because a) the book and b) he spends so much time hanging out in human spaces and c) come on food is great especially if you're out in a restaurant with a friend and food allergies/sensitivities/etc are a non-starter, and also d) the book version. Whether he's as enthusiastic about it as Aziraphale is up to interpretation, of course. But I am willing to entertain one hilarious alternate proposal I saw, which is that he just unhinges his jaw and devours an entire meal in one bite, unnerving waitstaff everywhere.

Also, I totally agree with you about angel wings, comma, coloration thereof. And also the Queen thing and basically this entire post. I'm perfectly happy to read Aziraphale/Crowley, but my favorite versions are the ones that are either kinda ace or lean into the inhumanness of how they approach the world at all times, or both; they love each other deeply, but I don't really care about the details of it. And I agree that the arc is about them loving Earth and humanity deeply too, even if it's also an arc to taking on everything else shoulder-to-shoulder to protect it. (Competently or not, but still.)

[melannen]

I have seen similar headcanons where it's just that Aziraphale is a very, slow, eater, and Crowley finishes first and just lingers over the wine, which, mood. But making it so Aziraphale likes indulgent things and Crowley likes Aziraphale - like a lot of the fic is doing - is unbalancing things even more than the wings thing. Crowley is every bit the earthy sensualist in all the ways that his Angel is!

[sylvaine]

All of the things you've pointed out in this post is why I'm feeling grumpy and crochety and Too Old For This about the recent Good Omens resurgence. ^^;; I'm glad the book holds up still! I should find a copy and reread it.

[melannen]

As mentioned above, there are a lot of just, small asides, of the kind of racial and/or fatphobic humour that we are a lot more careful with these days. And it is way more of a period piece than I realized in period! But the core still holds up well.

[lannamichaels]

#5: Yes, exactly. This is why I'm still mad about it. It's thematically important and they brushed it aside, why? So they could signal "angel" and "demon" visually? They already had a lot of visual signalling, they don't need to take the wings, too. The point is they're both angels, the point is there's no sides, the point is they're the same.

#10: I'm mad about this, too! Because it's also thematically important! That point where one of the Them points out that most people would say they're better off without the Them or the Johnsonites, that's really important. That Greasy Johnson and Adam were switched at birth is important. That they both made rival gangs is such a parallel. I don't know why we lost this, it would take an actual 5 seconds to say "you were right about the babies". It felt like they were leaving it implied that the nuns killed the third baby to make the demonic side seem more evil; there were a lot of those points. Both Heaven and Hell do bad things, but they wanted to make it clear that Hell is worse. And Crowley has black wings.

[lazaefair]

Maybe Gaiman was a little...off-balance without Pratchett? I respect and appreciate that he did this show for Terry, at Terry’s request. But I imagine it’s harder to do it without your partner in crime there to provide whatever it is he provided to your original alchemy for the original book.

[ilyena_sylph]

This is a truly excellent post and I like it very much.

[melannen]

Thank you!

[eleanor_lavish]

This is a Good Post. (Fun fact, I had never read the book, and decided to do it JUST before watching the series, which made for a great 1-to-1 juxtaposition without any childhood book baggage! It is really interesting to watch them make a not-at-all character driven book into a show... Definitely were some things that got lost in translation.)

One thing I think that the show does WELL is show the actual bureaucracy of Heaven and Hell. They look different, but they are at their core IDENTICAL, and I think that idea came through better on screen than in text. Nearly every "Crowley has to deal with annoying Hell bureaucrats" scene has a matching "Aziraphale has to deal with the idiots of Heaven who don't actually know what they're doing" scene, and they are great!

[melannen]

This is a really interesting comment! Because one thing I meant to put in this post but remembered too late is how much the book doesn't show either Heaven or Hell, right? There's, like, one or two passing mentions of Crowley sending Hell some of Earth's worst idea to implement, and that's basically it. Which I think works really well; by not showing us either one, it lets the reader imagine whatever they think is bad (like not showing the monster in horror) and it also keep the focus on Crowley and Aziraphale choosing Earth because they like it, not because they dislike the alternatives. (In fact, I was impressed on the re-read by how very, very little we actually know about Heaven in particular - basically all we see is Aziraphale and the Metatron, and everything else has to be induced by the reader from Aziraphale's reactions.) I think if they are showing Heaven and Hell (which might be a necessary adaptation change) showing them as exact mirrors is the only way to do it, and maybe that help so make up for the wings! But I also think something is lost by making them concrete - both loss of that possibility, but also (not having seen the show!) the concreteness itself is a loss; in the book, you get the impression that they love Earth because it is full of people and things, and if you show a Heaven and hell that are also full of people and things (which you'd almost have to do to put it on TV), then some of that difference is gone. IDK - I do have all that nostagia baggage! And also the realization of how much the book has shaped my foundational theology.

[pedanther]

+1.

[sophia_sol]

Crowley and Aziraphale are two people who’ve slowly realized they get on with each other better than with anyone else, and who have each other’s backs when it’s important, and that’s what matters, and that’s what’s human. The question of pining and passion is secondary.

this is exactly my problem with the vast majority of the fanfic I've been seeing out there and it keeps on disappointing me, but then I too an extremely very ace!

[melannen]

I keep running into authors that have Crowley say "I didn't do it for Earth, I did it for you, Angel," and I want to very gently reach through the screen and take their keyboards away. :(

[snickfic]

I was just thinking again yesterday how much I liked being able to download a fanmix. I don't have unlimited data and would much rather put the entire playlist on my MP3 player, rather than only have it available when I have internet access. Alas, as you say, that seems to have gone out of fashion now that people have easier options.

As far as keeping things in the right order goes, though, have you considered YouTube? You can make playlists there, and they don't seem to shuffle.

[melannen]

I have though about youtube! Youtube is annoying though because, a) free mobile youtube doesn't let you listen in the background, so I can't, say, listen while I play pokemon. And b) youtube is videos, not music; sometimes I specifically want the music and not the video, because the video makes the song read in a different way than I need it to for the playlist. Plus just how wasteful it is to make people stream video when all they want is music. (Plus the commercials are SO annoying on youtube.) Uploading a .zip is actually much easier now, I used to have to use SSH in a linux terminal! But there are now much, much easier ways to listen, so it seems like wasted effort to do. Maybe we should try to start a DW comm for it again or something....

[cadenzamuse]

I feel like most of the fanmix makers I know are split between Spotify (easier to do, are at least in order on desktop for free, more shelf-stable) and YouTube (stays in the right order, choices for music include unpublished covers). I do mine on Spotify, but I use Spotify Premium so it's somewhat a convenience-for-me thing, and somewhat a I spend a lot of time fiddling with my mixes while driving thing.

[melannen]

Hmm, so desktop Spotify does let free users listen in order? Maybe I should finally get around to downloading that.

[umadoshi]

imagine what you could have done if we’d gone the whole journey without seeing Crowley’s wings and when they were finally unfurled they were exactly the same as Aziraphale’s.

That would've been amazing. *^^*

I haven't reread the book in...probably about twenty years. I wonder if I will.

[silveredeye]

Playmoss is also an option for playlists. It's not perfect (it uses links to youtube/soundcloud/bandcamp/etc, so if a Youtube video has some restrictions that mean it can't be played it gets skipped in the mix), but after 8tracks decided to put all non-Americans on a "video found from Youtube, hope it's the correct one" plan Playmoss was decent enough for my needs.

Admittedly, I'm not a particularly cool kid, and if you only want the audio, no video at all, then Playmoss isn't optimal. :D

[chickiedeare]

Skipping the Good Omens stuff for now just to say:

I'll be glad to poach answers from the comments about where the fanmixes are going! I have a few I want to post, but have ended up in this odd situation where I don't really download mp3s anymore/all my mixes for myself are on spotify (and thereby difficult/impossible to export to 8tracks even if I could come up with cover art), but I also care verrrrry much about track order and also have some privacy concerns about having any fannish stuff I host on spotify somehow get linked to me IRL.

I also have the reverse situation where songs on older fanmixes, that were downloaded to my own computer, are not necessarily on Spotify so I can't put my *old* mixes there either. Grump grump grump.

[22degreehalo]

Really enjoyed this analysis! Completely agree with you on #7 - I read it for the first time a couple of years ago and haven't spent much time in fandom and I've always been a little surprised at the gap between the focus of the books versus fandom. Which isn't to be critical of fandom, but it deal feel weird seeing people gushing over the show and never mention anyone other than those two. I also agree that the book drags quite a bit at times.

With regards to #8, as a Very Ace myself, I was actually wondering if you had any good fic Crowley+Aziraphale fic recs? Especially any explicitly non-allo ones? They really are such a perfectly ace couple and I was really looking forward to reading some more ace-friendly fics but the tag 'Asexual Character' on AO3 has barely been applied to any fic for them so it doesn't seem easy to narrow down.